I will not fight and die for an abstraction. I will fight and die for a very real planet that we cannot live without no matter which neurons are firing in your little heads right now.

Imagine no animals left save for a few farm animals flooded with antibiotics and genetic modifications. Crops that are genetically modified so they don’t reproduce mixing with weeds and other plants. Overfarmed Soil dying so crops no longer grow. Massive climate changes with droughts, hurricanes and tornadoes. Less land mass. Extreme temperatures.

It’s a snowball too. The longer it takes to change the faster the changes will occur (as they have been doing). At some point a downhill slide is ineveitable. In the next 10yrs we will reach that point if we haven’t already. It’s something the scientists have been saying since I was in High School.

There is a great book about this called “Beyond Civilization” by Daniel Quinn. I highly reccomend it…a very fast and entertaining read as well.

Not true. What about all those who would have used their phones to call emergency assistance (and had no other options available to them)? If using an E-bomb in a hospital is immoral, then so too is the destruction of communication systems that save lives (and get people to the hospitals)…

regards

Gandhi failed because he became a star and he failed as a teacher to document what he had learned. Madison, who never sought stardom, almost succeded in documenting and teaching the wisdom of the Iroquois.

It seems as though Jensen is on the stardom track.

That said, Derrick’s observations have convinced me to rethink many aspects of my life. I don’t know exactly what the second step is, but the first one is simple – to integrate this knowledge and these questions into my own individual decision making process.

I guess my question is; isn’t that happening now? In fact, hasn’t that been happening for a while? The civilizations you mentioned in Africa, the Mediterranean, and South Asia used to be prosperous, but are now in a state of starvation and conflict. Millions in Africa, once the home of the most advanced civilization on earth, die because of lack of resources, while other millions in Western countries have so much that they just piss resources away. That, to me, sounds like “collapse.” But since it keeps happening, can we really call it an “endgame,” or should we just refer to it as transformation. If you want to stick a moral precept to it, you could call it evolution, devolution, entropy, etc. But you can’t really call it an end, can you? It’s a change; it’s different.

Maybe resources become even more concentrated with ‘elites;’ maybe the disadvantaged rise up and fight a bloody war to take from the elites, only to find themselves again ruled by elites. Perhaps all institutions dissolve, and people fend for themselves for a while, as happened in Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and how many others? You can’t call it “societal collapse,” because eventually our collective instincts return and we form neighborhoods, tribes, groups, collectives, communities, villages, trading partners, cities, city-states, treaty-builders and nations. It will look different, but it’s not collapse, unless you consider our current system to be somehow elevated to the new state. It’s just a transformation.